Kate M. Carey: We all have a dog in this fight

Tuesday

I awoke to the sounds of fighting last week. A new cat anxious to be a part of the family was at cross purposes with the current cat protecting her domain. Two cats. One bed. Hiss-hiss. Spit-spat.

To be awakened by a catfight was much better than what happened the previous week when my husband woke me up shouting from the front room that the cat got out.

This whole thing started out with a good deed. Don’t they all?

We volunteered to cat sit for a few days. A “trial visitation” to determine if we wanted to invite another cat into our single-cat household. The current owners needed to re-home her. They had a busy household and were planning a move. The cat needed us, but that weekend, she still belonged to another family.

Let’s stop for a moment and refer to the cat not as lost, but as the cat who escaped by breaking out a window. Escaped cat sounds much better than lost cat.

Before the escape, this lovely cat lived in one room while our current cat had the run of the house. They inspected each other through an interior glass door causing a bit of growling, some hissing, a swipe of a paw at the window – all to be expected.

The real wailing and gnashing of teeth occurred over the long Labor Day weekend when the cat went missing. Three days which felt interminable as we faced up to the owners admitting our negligence. Or, as I liked to tell it, the tale of their escape artist cat.

On Labor Day, a neighbor found the cat hidden in an outside shed barely a football field’s length away from our house. Kitty was scared, a bit hungry, but very happy to be lugged home, even with the other cat still in residence. Resurrection Cat we called her, third day and all.

We were thrilled that she was found! Of course, we decided to keep her. Of course, once Resurrection Cat returned home the spit-spat began again in earnest. One cat walks into the room and the other cat hisses. Days later, armistice – both cats will sit on opposite sides of the room happily shedding all over the upholstered chairs.

Still, they’re edgy around each other like so many of us these days.

Both cats puff up, hiss, spit, and are just a bit mean-spirited toward each other. They haven’t come to blows, just a lot of bloviating. Again, like many of us these days, bloviating, talking at length in an inflated or empty way.

As a nation, we struggle to find common ground these days. What used to be funny isn’t anymore. We walk closer to labels like “us” and “them” while we shy away from “community” and “neighborhood.”

We’re quick to take offense and quicker still to call someone out for their language or behaviors. We create an opinion before we have the facts. We blame before we seek a solution.

Maybe we’ve forgotten that we’re all God’s children. That we’re all human, part of humanity as human beings collectively. We’re a collective, a group, a whole.

We’re together yet remain apart. We’re the same, yet different. Like the two cats – one a calico with an orange blaze, a white chest, green eyes, and four white paws. One a lynx Siamese Manx – no tail, a tan coat and lynx-like hair tufts at her ears, blue eyes, and four white paws.

A stranger stopped us on the street in Winston-Salem seeking $14 for a motel room. He had a job. He said he’d get his first paycheck on Friday. He had a card with $35 but needed $14 more to get some sleep and a shower. He said he sought help at local churches, which turned him away, and the shelter which didn’t have an open bed. His employer was a corporation that didn’t care about a dishwasher’s needs. He said he served in the Army and he was headed to the Federal building on Monday to seek help with housing.

I told him I couldn’t give him the $14, but my friend and I gave him some cash. Did he need what he told us he needed – a room and a shower?

I don’t know. I don’t care. I made a $5 investment in humanity.

I made an investment in my belief that most of the time, most members of the human race are benevolent.

My lost, escaped cat was found by a neighbor, a member of my community, who cared about our loss and a missing animal and spent her time looking for my cat. That’s benevolence.

At the risk of mixing my metaphors, we all have a dog in this fight. The fight for civility, for understanding, for caring about each other. My two cats can hiss and spit-spat because I know given enough time, they’ll resolve their differences and live together.

We may not all be friends, but we’ll come back to civility, to seeking a solution before we assign blame, to forming opinions based on facts. This will happen because at heart, humans are both selfish creatures who wish to survive, but more importantly, we are social creatures needing each other to thrive. Our investments in humanity pay greater dividends.

Kate M. Carey lives in Lexington where she tries to be civil when a car cuts her off in traffic and she hopes for the same when she forgets to use her turn signal.

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